Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection
with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole. Mediating between
the individual and the social structure, the family effects control and conformity where
political and other authorities are insufficient. As the fundamental instrument and the
foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are prototypical. Serving
as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to
adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which
rules its citizens through its family heads. Even in patriarchal societies where they are
granted legal citizenship, women tend to be ruled through the family alone and have little
or no formal relation to the state.

As co-operation between the family and the larger society is essential, else both would
fall apart, the fate of three patriarchal institutions, the family, society, and the state
are interrelated. In most forms of patriarchy this has generally led to the granting of
religious support in statements such as the Catholic precept that "the father is head
of the family," or Judaism's delegation of quasi-priestly authority to the male
parent. Secular governments today also confirm this, as in census practices of designating
the male as head of household, taxation, passports etc. Female heads of household tend to
be regarded as undesirable; the phenomenon is a trait of poverty or misfortune. The
Confucian prescription that the relationship between ruler and subject is parallel to that
of father and children points to the essentially feudal character of the patriarchal
family (and conversely, the familial character of feudalism) even in modern democracies.

Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives
and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and
sale. Classically, as head of the family the father is both begetter and owner in a system
in which kinship is property. Yet in strict patriarchy, kinship is acknowledged only
through association with the male line. Agnation excludes the descendants of the female
line from property right and often even from recognition. The first formulation of the
patriarchal family was made by Sir Henry Maine, a nineteenth-century historian of ancient
jurisprudence. Maine argues that the patriarchal basis of kinship is put in terms of
dominion rather than blood; wives, though outsiders, are assimilated into the line, while
sisters sons are excluded. Basing his definition of the family upon the patria potestes
of Rome, Maine defined it as follows: "The eldest male parent is absolutely supreme
in his household. His dominion extends to life and death and is as unqualified over his
children and their houses as over his slaves." In the archaic patriarchal family
"the group consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves,
land and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest
male."

McLennon's rebuttal to Maine argued that the Roman patria potestes was an
extreme form of patriarchy and by no means, as Maine had imagined, universal. Evidence of
matrilineal societies (preliterate societies in Africa and elsewhere) refute Maine's
assumption of the universality of agnation. Certainly Maine's central argument, as to the
primeval or state of nature character of patriarchy is but a rather naif rationalisation
of an institution Maine tended to exalt. The assumption of patriarchy's primeval character
is contradicted by much evidence which points to the conclusion that full patriarchal
authority, particularly that of the patria potestes is a late development and the
total erosion of female status was likely to be gradual as has been its recovery.

In contemporary patriarchies the male's de jure priority has recently been
modified through the granting of divorce protection, citizenship, and property to women.
Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the
husband's domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of
the female's domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.

The chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialisation of the young
(largely through the example and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology's
prescribed attitudes toward the categories of role, temperament, and status. Although
slight differences of definition depend here upon the parents' grasp of cultural values,
the general effect of uniformity is achieved, to be further reinforced through peers,
schools, media, and other learning sources, formal and informal. While we may niggle over
the balance of authority between the personalities of various households, one must
remember that the entire culture supports masculine authority in all areas of life and -
outside of the home - permits the female none at all.

To insure that its crucial functions of reproduction and socialisation of the young
take place only within its confines, the patriarchal family insists upon legitimacy.
Bronislaw Malinowski describes this as "the principle of legitimacy" formulating
it as an insistence that "no child should be brought into the world without a man -
and one man at that - assuming the role of sociological father." By this apparently
consistent and universal prohibition (whose penalties vary by class and in accord with the
expected operations of the double standard) patriarchy decrees that the status of both
child and mother is primarily or ultimately dependent upon the male. And since it is not
only his social status, but even his economic power upon which his dependents generally
rely, the position of the masculine figure within the family - as without - is materially,
as well as ideologically, extremely strong.

Although there is no biological reason why the two central functions of the family
(socialisation and reproduction) need be inseparable from or even take place within it,
revolutionary or utopian efforts to remove these functions from the family have been so
frustrated, so beset by difficulties, that most experiments so far have involved a gradual
return to tradition. This is strong evidence of how basic a form patriarchy is within all
societies, and of how pervasive its effects upon family members. It is perhaps also an
admonition that change undertaken without a thorough understanding of the sociopolitical
institution to be changed is hardly productive. And yet radical social change cannot take
place without having an effect upon patriarchy. And not simply because it is the political
form which subordinates such a large percentage of the population (women and youth) but
because it serves as a citadel of property and traditional interests. Marriages are
financial alliances, and each household operates as an economic entity much like a
corporation. As one student of the family states it, "the family is the keystone of
the stratification system, the social mechanism by which it is maintained."

It is in the area of class that the caste-like status of the female within patriarchy
is most liable to confusion, for sexual status often operates in a superficially confusing
way within the variable of class. In a society where status is dependent upon the
economic, social, and educational circumstances of class, it is possible for certain
females to appear to stand higher than some males. Yet not when one looks more closely at
the subject. This is perhaps easier to see by means of analogy: a black doctor or lawyer
has higher social status than a poor white sharecropper. But race, itself a caste system
which subsumes class, persuades the latter citizen that he belongs to a higher order of
life, just as it oppresses the black professional in spirit, whatever his material success
may be. In much the same manner, a truck driver or butcher has always his
"manhood" to fall back upon. Should this final vanity be offended, he may
contemplate more violent methods. The literature of the past thirty years provides a
staggering number of incidents in which the caste of virility triumphs over the social
status of wealthy or even educated women. In literary contexts one has to deal here with
wish-fulfilment. Incidents from life (bullying, obscene, or hostile remarks) are probably
another sort of psychological gesture of ascendancy. Both convey more hope than reality,
for class divisions are generally quite impervious to the hostility of individuals. And
yet while the existence of class division is not seriously threatened by such expressions
of enmity, the existence of sexual hierarchy has been re-affirmed and mobilised to
"punish" the female quite effectively.

The function of class or ethnic mores in patriarchy is largely a matter of how overtly
displayed or how loudly enunciated the general ethic of masculine supremacy allows itself
to become. Here one is confronted by what appears to be a paradox: while in the lower
social strata, the male is more likely to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank
alone, he is actually obliged more often to share power with the women of his class who
are economically productive; whereas in the middle and upper classes, there is less
tendency to assert a blunt patriarchal dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more
power in any case.

It is generally accepted that Western patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts
of courtly and romantic love. While this is certainly true, such influence has also been
vastly overestimated. In comparison with the candour of "machismo" or oriental
behaviour, one realises how much of a concession traditional chivalrous behaviour
represents - a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means
of saving face. While a palliative to the injustice of woman's social position, chivalry
is also a technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is
a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of
courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal
or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status. As the
sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic versions of love
are "grants" which the male concedes out of his total powers. Both have had the
effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture and m their general
tendency to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a
narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behaviour. It was a Victorian habit, for
example, to insist the female assume the function of serving as the male's conscience and
living the life of goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male
is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is
(ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are
convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can
overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition.
Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and the burden of economic
dependency. As to "chivalry," such gallant gesture as still resides in the
middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the
status situation of the present.

Within patriarchy one must often deal with contradictions which ale simply a matter of
class style. David Riesman has noted that as the working class has been assimilated into
the middle class, so have its sexual mores and attitudes. The fairly blatant male
chauvinism which was once a province of the lower class or immigrant male has been
absorbed and taken on a certain glamour through a number of contemporary figures, who have
made it, and a certain number of other working-class male attitudes, part of a new, and at
the moment, fashionable life style. So influential is this working class ideal of brute
virility (or more accurately, a literary and therefore middle-class version of it) become
in our time that it may replace more discreet and "gentlemanly" attitudes of the
past.

One of the chief effects of class within patriarchy is to set one woman against
another, in the past creating a lively antagonism between whore and matron, and in the
present between career woman and housewife. One envies the other her "security"
and prestige, while the envied yearns beyond the confines of respectability for what she
takes to be the other's freedom, adventure, and contact with the great world. Through the
multiple advantages of the double standard, the male participates in both worlds,
empowered by his superior social and economic resources to play the estranged women
against each other as rivals. One might also recognise subsidiary status categories among
women: not only is virtue class, but beauty and age as well.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women tend to transcend
the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class of her birth and
education, the female has fewer permanent class association than does the male. Economic
dependency renders her affiliations with any class a tangential, vicarious, and temporary
matter. Aristotle observed that the only slave to whom a commoner might lay claim was his
woman, and the service of an unpaid domestic still provides working-class males with a
"cushion" against the buffets of the class system which incidentally provides
them with some of the psychic luxuries of the leisure class. Thrown upon their own
resources, few women rise above working class in personal prestige and economic power, and
women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class may offer its
male members. Women have therefore less of an investment in the class system. But it is
important to understand that as with any group whose existence is parasitic to its rulers,
women are a dependency class who live on surplus And their marginal life frequently
renders them conservative, for like all persons in their situation (slaves are a classic
example here) they identify their own survival with the prosperity of those who feed them.
The hope of seeking liberating radical solutions of their own seems too remote for the
majority to dare contemplate and remains so until consciousness on the subject is raised.

As race is emerging as one of the final variables in sexual politics, it is pertinent,
especially in a discussion of modern literature, to devote a few words to it as well.
Traditionally, the white male has been accustomed to concede the female of his own race,
in her capacity as "his woman" a higher status than that ascribed to the black
male. Yet as white racist ideology is exposed and begins to erode, racism's older
protective attitudes toward (white) women also begin to give way. And the priorities of
maintaining male supremacy might outweigh even those of white supremacy; sexism may be
more endemic in our own society than racism. For example, one notes in authors whom we
would now term overtly racist, such as D. H. Lawrence - whose contempt for what he so
often designates as inferior breeds is unabashed - instances where the lower-caste male is
brought on to master or humiliate the white man's own insubordinate mate. Needless to say,
the female of the non-white races does not figure in such tales save as an exemplum of
"true" womanhood's servility, worthy of imitation by other less carefully
instructed females. Contemporary white sociology often operates under a similar
patriarchal bias when its rhetoric inclines toward the assertion that the
"matriarchal" (e.g. matrifocal) aspect of black society and the
"castration" of the black male are the most deplorable symptoms of black
oppression in white racist society, with the implication that racial inequity is capable
of solution by a restoration of masculine authority. Whatever the facts of the matter may
be, it can also be suggested that analysis of this kind presupposes patriarchal values
without questioning them, and tends to obscure both the true character of and the
responsibility for racist injustice toward black humanity of both sexes.

One of the most efficient branches of patriarchal government lies in the agency of its
economic hold over its female subjects. In traditional patriarchy, women, as non-persons
without legal standing were permitted no actual economic existence as they could neither
own nor earn in their own right. Since women have always worked in patriarchal societies,
often at the most routine or strenuous tasks, what is at issue here is not labor but
economic reward. In modern reformed patriarchal societies, women have certain economic
rights, yet the "woman's work" in which some two thirds of the female population
in most developed countries are engaged is work that is not paid for. In a money economy
where autonomy and prestige depend upon currency, this is a fact of great importance. In
general, the position of women in patriarchy is a continuous function of their economic
dependence. Just as their social position is vicarious and achieved (often on a temporary
or marginal basis) though males, their relation to the economy is also typically vicarious
or tangential.

Of that third of women who are employed, their average wages represent only half of the
average income enjoyed by men. These are the U. S. Department of Labor statistics for
average year-round income: white male, $6704, non-white male $4277, white female, $3991,
and non-white female $2816. The disparity is made somewhat more remarkable because the
educational level of women is generally higher than that of men in comparable income
brackets. Further, the kinds of employment open to women in modem patriarchies are, with
few exceptions, menial, ill paid and without status.

In modem capitalist countries women also function as a reserve labor force, enlisted in
times of war and expansion and discharged in times of peace and recession. In this role
American women have replaced immigrant labor and now compete with the racial minorities.
In socialist countries the female labor force is generally in the lower ranks as well,
despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The status and
rewards o$ such professions have declined as women enter them, and they are permitted to
enter such areas under a rationale that society or the state (and socialist countries are
also patriarchal) rather than woman is served by such activity.

Since woman's independence in economic life is viewed with distrust, prescriptive
agencies of all kinds (religion, psychology, advertising, etc.) continuously admonish or
even inveigh against the employment of middle-class women, particularly mothers. The toil
of working class women is more readily accepted as "need," if not always by the
working-class itself, at least by the middle-class. And to be sure, it serves the purpose
of making available cheap labor in factory and lower-grade service and clerical positions.
Its wages and tasks are so unremunerative that, unlike more prestigious employment for
women, it fails to threaten patriarchy financially or psychologically. Women who are
employed have two jobs since the burden of domestic service and child care is unrelieved
either by day care or other social agencies, or by the cooperation of husbands. The
invention of labor-saving devices has had no appreciable effect on the duration, even if
it has affected the quality of their drudgery. Discrimination in matters of hiring,
maternity, wages and hours is very great. In the U. S. a recent law forbidding
discrimination in employment, the first and only federal legislative guarantee of rights
granted to American women since the vote, is not enforced, has not been enforced since its
passage, and was not enacted to be enforced.

In terms of industry and production, the situation of women is in many ways comparable
both to colonial and to pre-industrial peoples. Although they achieved their first
economic autonomy in the industrial revolution and now constitute a large and underpaid
factory population, women do not participate directly in technology or in production. What
they customarily produce (domestic and personal service) has no market value and is, as it
were, pre-capital. Nor, where they do participate in production of commodities through
employment, do they own or control or even comprehend the process in which they
participate. An example might make this clearer: the refrigerator is a machine all women
use, some assemble it in factories, and a very few with scientific education understand
its principles of operation. Yet the heavy industries which roll its steel and produce the
dies for its parts are in male hands. The same is true of the typewriter, the auto, etc.
Now, while knowledge is fragmented even among the male population, collectively they could
reconstruct any technological device. But in the absence of males, women's distance from
technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could replace or
repair such machines on any significant scale. Woman's distance from higher technology is
even greater: large-scale building construction; the development of computers; the moon
shot, occur as further examples. If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a
large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy
imposes upon women.

Since education and economy are so closely related in the advanced nations, it is
significant that the general level and style of higher education for women, particularly
in their many remaining segregated institutions, is closer to that of Renaissance humanism
than to the skills of mid-twentieth-century scientific and technological society.
Traditionally patriarchy permitted occasional minimal literacy to women while higher
education was closed to them. While modern patriarchies have, fairly recently, opened all
educational levels to women, the kind and quality of education is not the same for each
sex. This difference is of course apparent in early socialisation but it persists and
enters into higher education as well. Universities, once p]aces of scholarship and the
training of a few professionals, now also produce the personnel of a technocracy. This is
not the case with regard to women. Their own colleges typically produce neither scholars
nor professionals nor technocrats. Nor are they funded by government and corporations as
are male colleges and those co-educational colleges and universities whose primary
function is the education of males.

As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the
sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or coeducational, accept a cultural
programming toward the generally operative division between "masculine" and
"feminine" subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences
(at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the female - and science and technology,
the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of course the balance of
employment, prestige and reward at present lie with the latter. Control of these fields is
very eminently a matter of political power. One might also point out how the exclusive
dominance of males in the more prestigious fields directly serves the interests of
{patriarchal power in industry, government, and the military. And since patriarchy
encourages an imbalance in human temperament along sex lines, both divisions of learning
(science and the humanities) reflect this imbalance. The humanities, because not
exclusively male, suffer in prestige: the sciences, technology, and business, because they
are nearly exclusively male reflect the deformation of the "masculine"
personality, e.g., a certain predatory or aggressive character.

In keeping with the inferior sphere of culture to which women in patriarchy have always
been restricted, the present encouragement of their "artistic" interests through
study of the humanities is hardly more than an extension of the
"accomplishments" they once cultivated in preparation for the marriage market.
Achievement in the arts and humanities is reserved, now, as it has been historically, for
males. Token representation, be it Susan Sontag's or Lady Murasaki's, does not vitiate
this rule.